Public deserves to know details of bribery case

The public has a right to know how the 15th Judicial District became involved in an alleged bribery scandal, but it's difficult to learn what happened when officials aren't fully compliant with open records requests.

The Daily Advertiser made a bit of headway in recent days when it made separate requests under the state's Open Records Law to the offices of 15th Judicial District Judge Edward Rubin and District Attorney Mike Harson. These requests were made in the course of reporting on the guilty pleas of three employees of the Lafayette Parish District Attorney's office in the recent bribery case involving drunken driving arrests.

Rubin initially denied our Jan. 16 request for four items from his office, citing an attorney general's opinion from 1996 that the state's public records law was not intended to apply to the judiciary. The opinion is based on a 1981 Louisiana Supreme Court case.

After we consulted with our newspaper's legal counsel, we challenged Rubin's denial of our request on the basis that the ruling in that 1981 case had a very narrow scope and did not apply to this situation. We also cited a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that there is no special exemption to the public records law for the judiciary. We then made a request for two additional items, including financial records.

While Rubin's office has as yet not produced the initial four items and referred us to the Clerk of Court's Office for another, we did receive the requested financial records.

This represents a small step, but we believe, a significant one, in our efforts to discover how far this scheme to use the legal system extends.

The request to obtain public records from Harson's office has also been difficult.

Throughout our investigation into the DA's office and how Operating While Intoxicated cases are handled in this jurisdiction, we have encountered numerous instances of public officials being exempted from public records laws.

We feel strongly that we have a responsibility to hold these public officials accountable for information regarding any criminal, negligent or improper behavior. We also feel this is a public safety issue.

Louisiana, and Lafayette specifically, has a much higher than average incidence of repeat OWI offenders. OWI arrests increase each year, but prosecution is minimal. And, while OWI-related deaths decrease across the country, they continue to be high here. In some areas, they are increasing.

As for the open records request of the DA's office, we asked Harson's office, in part, for a breakdown of the number of 894 and immediate 894s approved from 2008 to 2011. The term 894 refers to the program that allows OWI defendants to avoid prosecution in exchange for a fee. In the response from the DA's office, we were told that they were not required to "make a compilation" of those specific documents, but invited us to sift through four years' worth of OWI records and make our own compilation.

While Harson's office did not deny our records request outright, the result is that The Daily Advertiser will have to go to the DA's office and physically collect the information. It seems that compiling that kind of crucial information is something the DA's office should be tracking on a consistent basis.

These are important pieces of information that the public deserves to know, and we will continue to push for answers.

Ultimately, this culture of secrecy in government has got to stop. The public should demand it.

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Public deserves to know details of bribery case

The public has a right to know how the 15th Judicial District became involved in an alleged bribery scandal, but it's difficult to learn what happened when officials aren't fully compliant with open